I mentioned my Sub is in for overhaul. Not only is it taking forever (I might get it back next month) and costing over $1,100, Rolex almost wouldn’t overhaul it because they said the clasp was bad on the bracelet. Really? Seemed fine to me. They wouldn’t do the overhaul unless I bought a new Oyster bracelet for $900 – for a total of $2,146. I declined. They sent it back to the jeweller, I took the bracelet off myself (since the jeweller wasn’t allowed to), and the jeweller sent it back to Rolex. Without the bracelet, Rolex is happy to overhaul the watch. I’d like to have had the braclet prettified, but bugger me if I’m going to spend almost a kilobuck on a new one.
Getting really off topic, but this is even happening with farm equipment! Tractors that must be sent back to the dealer’s service department for maintenance.
Of course this cuts both ways. Watchmakers can tell of terrible “repairs”. This site refers to “hobbyist repairs”. Stay Away from HOBBYIST Accutron Repair
Here’s the results of a repair person who thought nothing of scratching comments on a customer’s watch!
You can buy a watch battery replacement kit for $11. (just tools, you have to buy the appropriate battery separately)
I have used it and it worked perfectly fine for me. No problems at all. That said, I did it on a $300 watch, not a Breitling. I imagine this voids any warranties on the watch (although if dad’s watch I would think any warranties have long since expired).
Also, it is possible Breitling (or whoever) does something proprietary that this would not work. That and/or the battery is buried in the watch such that it is necessary for an expert to get at it and replace it. Also, also, water proofing seals may be compromised and need care/replacing. When I did mine the rubber rings were easy to spot and I didn’t damage them but neither do I swim with my watch (I could but I don’t).
In my case, I removed the back cover and the battery was right there. Popped it out, put a new one in and replaced the cover. Probably took five minutes and I was going slow to be careful.
Which is to say, if you try this it’s on you. But it is a helluva lot cheaper than $200. Unless they are doing other things to improve the watch while it is in for a new battery that is outrageous for a battery change.
I have found battery replacements for water resistant watches usually include new gaskets and a pressure test. I have a quartz Omega Seamaster (heresy you cry! - it was a present) and a battery replacement with the above cost me $90 in Australia, so about 60 USD.
I have a Tag Heur Caibre S Aquatimer for sailboat racing. This is also a quartz mechanism, but with 5 stepper motors and a huge amount of mechanical gear trains and bits. After a lot of abuse I needed a full service (hint, don’t go sailing in seawater and forget to rinse the watch immediately after.) Flat fee of $700. They actually replaced the movement and a chipped crown. I have found flat service fees to be exactly what they say from most vendors. It sounds as if Rolex is just trying it on to gouge as much money as possible. This is leaning on the mystique of the brand, and how “special” it is. Which it isn’t.
and then I found this:
When I was traveling around Europe on a Eurail pass all of the platform clocks in the stations – at least in the countries I traveled in – were the same, big chunky hour and minute hands so you could read them at a distance and a second hand with red disk on the end. Further, comparing them with my wrist watch they were all synchronized, something of a miracle in 1976.
Italy the train could be as much as five minutes late departing, France perhaps two minutes. Germany, fifteen seconds but in Switzerland, when that disk hit 12, the train moved.
Was that really so unusual at the time? All it takes is some master clock at the station that all the station clocks are wired to; and preferably you’d want that master clock, in turn, to sync periodically to some external time signal disseminated via radio or telecommunications cables. I have a somewhat nerdy interest in all things calendar and timekeeping, and from what I’ve read such schemes were already in place in the 19th century. (A low-tech precursor in place since the 18th century was the time ball at the Greenwich observatory that ships leaving London could use to set their marine chronometers to exact time for the determination of longitude - that’s the reason why Greenwich Mean Time became the standard that the world’s time zone system is premised upon.)
Now, as far as the punctuality of German trains is concerned, this surely has changed since the 1970s…
Why? They tell time. They are easy to read. They don’t need charging. They work every where.
Sure a cellphone will tell time, maybe more accurately. IF it has a charge and can get a signal.
As I alluded to above, time is important to railroads too, long before flight. Back then it was pocket watches, not wrist watches and the company was fussy about them. The watch would be sent in to the company timekeeper twice a year to be oiled and adjusted. On arriving work, the crew would set their watch to match the station’s clock which, in turn, was kept on time by telegraph, an At the tick, the time is… like on the phone.
I keep seeing “Railroad pocket watches” for sale and laugh because they have at most, one or two of the characteristics demanded by the railroads.
- Arabic numerals, not Roman
- A cover over the face
- The stem for winding, setting, and opening the cover at 3 instead of 12
- The time is set by something other than pulling the winder stem, typically by pulling a lever out, a lever available only with the cover open.
I have wondered why the stem had to be at 3 o’clock but that’s what they wanted.
Yes, I have read people often decrying the deterioration of DB, not just the timeliness but dirty and worn-out equipment and stations.
I wear Invicta watches. Nice,not cheap, but hardly wealth signaling.
I believe you are mistaken about some of those requirements, although you may be referring to a specific railroad’s requirements. See the requirements stated in this article, authored by a member of the National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors:
That’s what I’d read ages ago in a Railroad magazine from the mod-1930s. Perhaps the writer was recalling a railroad with its own standards and not adopted the Ball standard in your article.
Certainly a cell phone can keep time without a cell signal. Does anyone know how accurate a cell phone clock is without a time signal to synch to?
Phones will likely use a dedicated real time clock chip which is somewhat compromised due to the size constraints. Deep in a rice grained sized package is the crystal.
The Micro-Crystal RV-8063-C7 quotes ±20 ppm @ 25°C. (This was just the first one I turned up in a search.)
I wasn’t referring to cell phones specifically when I referred to mechanical watches being obsolete, and indeed, cell phones might not be too picky about their own timekeeping, given that they reset so frequently and easily. I was comparing watches to watches: Even without any sort of radio signal, a quartz watch made to any sort of reasonable quality standards will far outperform gears and springs, for a price three orders of magnitude cheaper. And yes, the battery will eventually die, but then, the mechanical watch will need to be serviced on the same sort of timescale (and even the servicing costs two orders of magnitude more than an entire new quartz watch).
±20 parts per million what?
Units of time per units of time.
FWIW:
Note: A typical microcontroller crystal has a 100ppm specification
(~8.6s error per day). SOURCE
Is there a more meaningful measurement? I mean, 'units of time per units of time could mean ±20 hours per minute, which would be wildly inaccurate. Sorry to beat it, but ‘seconds per month’ would be more useful.